A white side of black Britain: The concept of racial literacy

Abstract

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Keywords:

• Antiracism
• racism
• black identity
• interracial families
• critical race theory
• black Europeans

Acknowledgments

This article is based on a larger field research project concerning white antiracism that received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Dean's Office at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I owe special thanks to Kathleen Blee, Mitchell Duneier, Avery Gordon, Sarah Susannah Willie, Irma McClaurin, Charles Gallagher, Miri Song, Julia Wrigley and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. This essay also benefited from the insights of the following audiences: Ph.D. Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Department of Sociology Colloquium at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Department of Sociology Colloquium at Northwestern University, Department of Sociology at Duke University, Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. I am also very thankful to the following scholars for their support of this research: Claire Alexander, Les Back, Philip Kasinitz, and John Mollenkopf.

Notes

FRANCE WINDDANCE TWINE is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

ADDRESS: P.O. Box 23609, Santa Barbara, CA 93121, USA.

Email: [email protected]

See page 34. of Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin. 2001. The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism. Rowman and Littlefield.

See Vikram Dodd, ‘Black women win payout for soldier's abuse’, the Guardian, 16 September, 2000.

Women like Sue, who until the 2001 census did not have the option of a ‘mixed race’ box and may have appeared on the 1991 UK census as either a ‘Black Other’ or simply as an Other.

See Philomena Essed's Everyday Racism: Towards an Interdisciplinary Theory for a groundbreaking conceptualization and analysis of everyday racism.

See Bearing Blackness and Whiteness in Britain: An Ethnography of Racism and Racial Formation at the end of Empire. Forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Leicester, a city located 99 miles North of London by rail, is in the East Midlands of Britain. It is one of the larger cities in the region and serves as the transportation hub for the county. In 1991 Leicester had a population of 293,400, including a student population of around 30,000 associated with the City's two universities. Leicester has the distinction of being the local authority with the highest percentage of all ethnic minorities including the largest Asian Indian population in the United Kingdom. Asian Indians constitute 22.3% of the population. However black people constitute only 2.4% of the population while Pakistanis and Bangladeshis constitute 1.4%.

Anthony Rampton et al. West Indian Children in Our Schools: Interim Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups, (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1981).

In Racialised Barriers Stephen Small (1994) provides an analysis of how racialised ideologies circulate among teachers, coaches, trainers and managers of sports institutions. He notes that ‘while the state is central to the dissemination of some racialised ideologies, other racialised ideologies are important and are embraced and disseminated by groups outside the formal political arena’.

In Leicester several of the women who have chaired and administered ACE and who regularly teach at the Saturday School are qualified teachers who earned their degrees in England and are committed community activists. As in other supplementary schools there is no formal syllabus and the focus of the lesson plans varies considerably depending upon the interests and areas of specialization of the volunteer teacher who leads that week's session.

Six of the twenty students who had attended all year were ‘mixed race’. The population of the Saturday School fluctuates between 20 and 40.The retention of the preteens and teenagers was cited as a major problem by Aisha.

See American Apartheid by Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) for an analysis of residential segregation by race and The Politics of ‘Race’ and Residence by Susan J. Smith (1989) for an analysis of the British case.

I had a number of private discussions with Justine. But Justine thought it was important that I hear her daughter's perspective so I had an opportunity to discuss these issues with the two of them. To my surprise, Saasqua self-identified as a ‘breed’, which she explained was short for ‘half-breed’, a term borrowed from Hollywood Westerns. In the Western, this was a pejorative term referring to individuals who were of mixed Anglo-American and American-Indian parentage. One can find an example of this character from the John Wayne film The Searchers.

Roughly one-half of the women I interviewed had either only dated black men or had married their black boyfriend as a teenager, often after having only casually dated a white male. The remaining women had either married or dated white men prior to establishing a relationship with a black man. Five of the women I interviewed had children fathered by a white man and then married or established a domestic partnership with a black man and had subsequent children. These mothers were all socially integrated into the black community and reported having at least one close black female friend.

On Saturday, 21 April, 1979, the front page and lead article of the Leicester Mercury read ‘5,000 police move in for the “Front” march’. The lead article reports on the National Front march through the city and the peaceful counter-demonstration of 1,500 people in opposition to the National Front in which Brian Piper and his son participated.

See F. James Davis, Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition, 1991, (University Park:Pennsylvania State University Press).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

France Winddance Twine

FRANCE WINDDANCE TWINE is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ADDRESS: P.O. Box 23609, Santa Barbara, CA 93121, USA. Email: [email protected]